Cirque du So...scary

I wouldn't say I necessarily grew up going to the circus, but somehow in that tangled mess of memory I recall purchasing tickets at Ted's Barber Shop (mom, dad, is that right?) and going to see the Ringling circus when it came to town. Lions and Tigers and . . . who really remembers? Since then, it seems the circus has become a scary thing to me--reminds me of carnies or little people or overexuberant patriotism or Branson, Missouri. The Cirque du Soleil has a certain creative sophistication to it that is lacking at your run-of-the-mill Barnum and Bailey's, but it's still something I've never been interested in. It began in Quebec twenty-five years ago and has become an international extravaganza. [Would it be appropriate to mention Mormons yet again?] Once a year they open their training facilities to the public, and so I, upon certain persuasion from my roommate, went along for the ride. Susanne had promised to bring her ESL students, so I found myself cracking ridiculous jokes for the sake of high school students from Venezuela, France, Germany, Japan, and Mexico.

It's a big production, this circus business. It's also captivating, and terrifying, and weird, and a whole bundle of things. The "clowns," all in incredibly detailed costumes (some of which take over 300 hours to create), ran about, weaving between Japanese tourists and German tourists and we-tourists. Some of the designs have a nouveau grunge feel to them, and I felt like I'd landed in a Hot Topic where all the brooding kiddies had come to buy the latest in skull jewelery. Most of them walk around silently [very threatening]; the ones that choose to giggle or squeal seem to forfeit a bit of their mystique. But, look at this:

Meet the fabric climber. She strategically and gracefully wraps herself in two long strips of cloth suspended from the ceiling. Through a series of maneuvers, she tumbles and flips and

sends knots of fabric (falling like so much paint) down toward the specators. Jaded Jordan, cynic at heart, finds herself amazed. As I write this, I like to imagine how unsophisticated I would look, wrapping fabric around my legs and doing flips. And I also like to imagine how much fun I would have doing it.

[Hi J-friend.]

"I'm not much on rear window ethics"

I hung my laundry out yesterday on a cord that stretches through a small courtyard separating this building from that building. More than thirty windows face out toward this narrow center, and though I may recognize a face from time to time, I do not know these people. Lives in cities are public, but not shared. I will probably never sit down to tea with the middle-aged man who lives stage left from me (while sitting on my balcony), but he likely knows the textures and colors of my clothing. It's a cold intimacy.

Had Jimmy Stewart been lacking in charm in Hitchcock's film "Rear Window," his voyeuristic tendencies may have been eerie or threatening. I'm counting on my charisma in order to avoid Karma's retribution. Because it's hard not to observe, to stare, to keep staring. There is a Portuguese woman that lives in the apartment across the street from mine. She sits on her front porch and cackles. My roommates refer to her as "the Laughing Woman," and inform me that she's likely demented. I've heard that should she see someone on a balcony across from her or a passer-by, she will dance for them (with her husband's embarassed screams, apparently, serenading each dip of the hip). I am hoping to one day solicit her attention through my own signature move(s). In the meantime, I've been observing her. While sipping coffee in the kitchen, I listen for her laughter. I run to my room to grab the video camera. While she does not know I have recorded her balcony antics, I'm beginning to realize that perhaps I should be asking myself what I do not know. Who takes note of me?

At night, certain city dwellers meet behind the tennis courts at the Parc Mont Royal when dogs are allowed off their leashes. The dogs play with their "friends" as the owners stand and observe, hands in pockets, shoulders raised against the cold. They've been coming for years, although they never exchange names. They know each other only through the dogs they own; I am "Meeka's roommate," and "the American." Conversation is exchanged, shifting between French and English and dog-commands. It is a community of sorts, but certainly sterile. For me, the outsider, it is all delightful, mostly, I suppose, because it seems so cinematic.

This is what we share in the city, or what I have decided to share with the city tonight: the aroma of cooked apples, stewing with lemon, ginger, and cinnamon; the crackle of France's nightly news, transported so carefully across the Atlantic in order to not bend or break the accent; the shadow of my back to the (front) window, typing away about those that are most likely writing poetry about the curve of my spine and the way I shift about uncomfortably on my bed, pull at my hair, and bend out the window to read the fall air.

porkchops, mormons(!), and science (of sleep). in no particular order.

Life is absurd and wonderful and unexpected. I'm at the Brûlerie St. Denis where one can purchase gelato and paninis and hot chocolate à la français. Outside, a woman in a Toyota has road rage, then peeks into her rear view mirror to apply some lipstick; behind me, a Chinese man talks about picking up under-aged girls at the park. I'm convinced that life is more interesting than fiction, but sometimes it takes a good film to permit us to recognize that or even to premeditate a bit of that in our own lives. Michel Gondry's new film "The Science of Sleep" is one I've been stalking on the internet for quite some time. A perk of living in a big city is not waiting six months for your favorite art house movie to trickle its way down to the Midwest. For those of you familiar with his work (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and the ever lovely Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), you'd do well to remark that he's interested in images, whether images that he's physically captured with a camera or images that he produces for the camera. The film shifts between a cardboard village (in the main character's dream state) and the real world. I won't add too much movie critique to this blog, but the film (which I saw on Friday night) seemed to provide a framework for my weekend. As the film thrived on surreal images and startling juxtapositions, I (re)discovered the charm of the absurd outside of the movie house.

On Saturday I descend into the metro Place des Arts. Upon entering its breezy turnstiles, one notices a little placard on the wall, no words written across its face, just a music note, beneath which many a musician set up shop. I've come to expect a jazz ballad by a long-haired man sitting in a pile of greasy rags in the corner, the music usually better than I might suspect. Today I hear the words to my favorite (and overplayed) Easter song "Christ the Lord is Risen Today." There to greet me, a host of . . . MORMONS! Now, I have a certain fondness for mormons. I have a (probably famous) picture of yours truly, a North Korean, and a Mormon, arms interlocked, Heinekens raised (don't worry, the Mormon obstained), celebrating la joie de vivre in France; I can even remember several occasions where a pair of missionaries played football with my family on 25th street. Charmed by this scene, interrupting my cynical metro personality, I move to a corner to write a little ditty about it in my journal. The choir, the sticky trap, and I, the bait, I'm helpless when out of the woodwork, like cockroaches, fellow mormons (of the non-choir variety) fan out to push pamphlets and tales of Joseph Smith down my newly-urbanized throat. But I enjoy it. Even as I pull away (after having a nice conversation with Sister Derossa from Florida) I notice the beautiful manner in which the hymns mix with the rumbling trains, echoing most strangely through the concrete corridors. This is part one.

Part two. Location: the Olympic Basin on the island Jean Drapeau, south of downtown. I've come to watch my roommate Susanne participate in the Quebec National Dragonboat Competition. It's Crew decorated with a bit of East Asian culture, each boat outfitted with a tamtam drum and a drummer to beat out the rowing speed. It's a strange venue, so nostalgic for the events that gave birth to it that, while still active, seems cavernous and hollow. Its wretched 70s-style architecture--heaps of aesthetically piled cement--further roots it in the past, giving it a strange paranoid feel in 2006.

Part three. Here's where the porkchops come in. Louise made them. She plays the guitar. She sings in Gaelic and Creole and Hebrew. She composes songs about meeting ex-husbands in restauraunts. She sings hymns and leads a house church in worship, but claims that she no longer prays. Pierre eats them, the porkchops. It is his 48th birthday and he kisses the top of my head when I hug him. He describes me to others as "a democrat, probably a Communist." If I saw him on the street, I would be afraid of him. We sing, Louise, Pierre, myself, and others bearing certain weight, certain disease, even certain joy. My hands smell like quiche and grilled meat. I fold them in my lap and try to keep up with my favorite old hymns, sung now in French. Pierre bebops and wails and adds flourishes. The man with AIDS releases himself into the music, and I break myself into their harmony.

"Well does the fact that I'm trying to do it do it for you?"

Well, folks, these are the only two options: 1) look the part, or 2) totally reject the part. I've read Baudrillard, Zizek, Deleuze; I've been lost in the fog of theory. You've probably been "fortunate" enough to hear me use the words "simulation" and "simulacra" before. From my experience, I've found that about 90% of really playing the part is imitating the part. "Just act like you know what you're doing," my mother has always told me, and in my tainted little head, simulating preparedness is just about as good as preparedness itself. Yesterday marked my first day at KINO, and I decided it best to don the glasses, pack the vintage thermos, and arrive on time. That's more effort than this vendor at Parc Mont Royal put in, eh?

Before I arrived in Montreal, KINO put on one of its many kabarets. This one involved collaboration between some of its most celebrated artiste-kinoites and writers present for the International Literature Festival. Authors wrote screenplays that the kinoites developed into short films, and the kabaret screened the finished products to a crowd of over 200 people. This is but one small example of KINO's creative spirit and its willingness to continually transform artistic expression and collaboration. The organization has often been compared to the French New Wave, although KINO's founding members contest that it's more of a social movement than an artistic one. The goal is ultimately to encourage filmmaking, from professionals and neophytes alike. This means that there is definite schlock to wade through at the festivals, but there are also real gems from unexpected sources. More importantly, filmmaking is democratized, FREED from the clutches of the Man, the system, the business.

Easily-organizable tidbits:
1) The Quebecois French accent=impenetrable!!!!
2) A fellow intern, François, refers to himself, like Jean-Claude Van Damme, as "the muscles from Brussels," but accidentally says "ze mussels from Belgium" in a thick French accent. [How'd you like my oh-so-clever transcription of "muscles"?]
3) Geneviève, the KINO coordinator, often uses the word "intense" (same in French as it is in English), but TENDER! might be more appropriate as today she made up a salad large enough to share with me at lunch.
4) At lunch we argue (four Montrealers pitted against poor lil' Jordie) about winter and cold. Not one of them believes I've ever felt cold as one feels it in Montreal. People get territorial about their cold weather?! Since I operate on a Fahrenheit model, and they on Celsius, our arguments make little sense. I later look up average temperatures for both Montreal and Madison, put them together on a graph, and discover that on average there's only six degrees (Fahrenheit) of difference between a Montreal winter and a Madison winter. [Incidentally Fahrenheit and Celsius are the same at 40 degrees below zero. Perhaps, should this winter reach that point, we will finally be able to argue on the same plane.] Since none of them has lived in either Wisconsin or Nebraska, I guess it is I who will be the true judge of what we Americans know about suffering, come January. I'll keep you updated. [Sidenote: Leif tells me the U.S. has lost every war it has fought against Canada. I'm here to break that trend!]

Some days it does seem easier to sleep on a bench while on the job, "let the popsicles sell themselves." But had I decided upon this option, Uncle Sam would hunt me down, ask me to return his money, and I'd be . . . well, asleep in the park. And that would be less-than-acceptable come next month when I'll be included in the kabaret fun.

of metro and movie(s)

What I liked about life in France was the general challenge of the quotidien. Buying a baguette required a certain savvy, the appropriate pronunciation. Montreal, though less challenging (the streets are on a grid, and unfortunately most Montrealers speak English fluently, in addition to their French), offers its own set of rewards for even the most insignificant activities--including moviegoing.

Today I took the metro for the first time (up to this point it had been unnecessary--I can walk to any place I'd really like to go in 45 minutes), finding myself at the Forum theatre to see Fatih Akin's rockumentary "Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul." [I highly recommend checking out the film, or at least the trailer: http://www.crossingthebridge.de/.] Ah, IT TASTES SO GOOOOOOOD!--both to challenge myself, to succeed, and, well, to be back in a movie theatre. Somehow my familarity with a city's movie theatres is a direct gauge of my comfortability and/or enjoyment of a place. It's clear that I could blow a lot of time, money, and potential social opportunites at the cinema this year.

Sidebar #1: I noticed an old woman on rue de l'Esplanade that made the sign of the cross in front of a fountain with a statue of the Virgin Mary. When I pass her, she says, in French, "the dust is free."

Sidebar #2: Since city people seem to be keen on therapy, I've decided to enroll myself in my own sort of therapy. Thus, to keep my mind straight, I plan, at least as the weather holds, to watch tennis matches at the park. oh, that glorious white noise.

pontification even gets the pope in trouble

I realize that I've spent two posts pontificating (nice use of the target word, jordan!) on poutine and McDonald's, relying on these fineries as a sort of Rick Steves back-alley guide to Canada and my thoughts. I understand, too, that some of you may have no idea why I'm in Montreal nor why you should take the time to read my updates. So this is me, cutting to the chase.

Montreal is a funny place. Not only is it in Canada [insert giggles], but they speak French, and a strange, strange French at that. Most of my encounters begin with "excusez-moi, mais j'ai du mal à comprendre l'accent québecois" (pardon me, but I have a problem understanding the Quebecois accent). I have heard, however, that the Quebecois accent actually resembles the French spoken in 18th Century France (not just some Texas-twang dialect that we francophones can scorn). (Notice how I'm not cutting to the chase). As the second half of my Masters program, I'm here to intern with KINO '00, a non-profit that encourages filmmakers and artists to "do well with nothing, do even better with a little, and do it right now!" Originating in Montreal, the KINO network is a worldwide phenomenon (like Mormonism), with cells in France, Germany, Belgium, Russia, Brazil, Finland, Bénin, Sénégal, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Australia, and in the U.S., Wisconsin and Kentucky. It's all a bit complicated, so check out kino00.com (in French) or wis-kino.com (in English). I start on Wednesday, so I'll keep you updated.

I live in the Plateau neighborhood--a Greenwich Village-esque quarter whose writers, artists, and creativity have turned a once working-class neighborhood into the hipster hotspot. Fortunately I'm not paying the going rate for an apartment. Here are photos of the digs (view from the balcony, the front, the stairway, which is my favorite part, and Meeka):

life is pretty good. i mean, look at that stairwell. my goodness.

this one must be about cheese [in the abstract sense of the word]

I found this clever bit of grafitti down in Vieux Montreal, the part of the city that most resembles the antique neighborhoods of Paris. Translated, it reads, "this street constructed by the Romans in 50 AD." As I admire the skills and humor of the artist, I hope to follow in his or her example by providing you with an amateurish, but hopefully memorable, tour of this city as it begins to unfold through my adventures.

Today Leif and I walked up the less seedy end of Boulevard Ste.-Catherine to Petite Italie, where the Quebecian flag is replaced with the tri-colored Italian, the older men speak less and less French (or English)--congregating outside of bar fronts and church fronts and anything fronts--and where the soul finds a bit of rest from the traffic of downtown. We had hoped to explore Notre-Dame de la Défense, an Italian Catholic church with a controversial fresco of Mussolini over the high altar. Unfortunately the door was locked (I'll return for mass someday and inconspicuously snap a photo). The fresco seems to underscore an even larger tension in Montreal's spiritual and civic life. The city is notorious for its intense secularism, and there's an entire industry built upon the conversion of old churches and places of worship into high-price flats and university housing. In the Latin Quarter, Leif and I spotted a Gothic cathedral and walked up the stairs into a sort of nothingness--an urban atrium leading to a university cafeteria. The infrastructure is still there--the vaulted ceilings, the rounded rose stained glass--but cheezy tables and not-so-subtle vending machines take the place of candle-lit altars; intello conversations and lude humor replace pious silence. The irony is hardly missed, and I suppose one's not supposed to ignore it. But there's an eeriness in walking into the double doors of a domineering church to find students sitting at rickety tables, eating poutine.

Ah, poutine . . . a Quebecian specialty. Here's a photo to get you started.

Cheese curds (mmmm!), french fries, and a peppery gravy. Sounds as bad as it looks, and yet (though my bowels may offer their dissent tomorrow), it's not half bad. It will most likely be comforting when it's 50 below zero in January.

Here's me "enjoying" such fine Canadian cuisine.

All this talk of poutine and I'm getting a little road weary. I guess that's why I'm an amateur, relegated to the spray-painted, vandal-inspired tour-guiding circuit. One of these days I'll show you where I live, with whom I live, and explain why the heck I'm even residing in this strange, cheese-curd-ridden, parallel universe. I offer one Canadian dollar to anyone that comes back . . . for more poutine!

P.S. For a more poetic understanding of the religious/civic divide in Montreal, check out Denys Arcand's lovely film Jésus de Montréal.

c'est ça que j'm

In France, McDonald's was notorious for it's strange ad campaigns involving people in precarious situations and the simple words "Je t'expliquerai chez McDo," or "I'll explain it to you at McDonalds." Somehow I've found McDonald's, despite its over-globalized self, to be a strange marker of cultural differences, either through its method of pulling in customers, or its sense of nationalism. Here in Canada, a small maple leaf graces the golden arches. As an "imperialist," I'm surprised the arches have not been exported with an American flag attached firmly. To say the least, it's a curious delight--the small defiling of a usually very American icon.

This, then, is a "get to know Canada," or the intermittent updating of my life way up north. For those of you that spend much time with me, you've often heard me refer to blogs (and anything internet) as something rather pornographic. I like to use charged terms in an inappropriate context. Nonetheless, the blog, in all of its pornographic glory, allows me to share photos and riveting stories. For example, although I'm here for my French, I've already been blessed with a curious Spanish interaction. Leif and I wandered around the "mountain"--Mont Royal--in town yesterday, where a Rasta man kept calling over at us, "Amigo!" I ignored him until his persistance irritated, and I responded "no habla espanol." I like to call attention to moments where I feel I've been rather clever, and so I share the story.

I need a hook, something to inspire you all to return, to wait anxiously for my next post. But I suppose this is all I have to hook you--this calling attention to my need for a captivating closer. I pity da fool who don't come back a-knocking. A la prochaine...